Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of contemporary US constructions of Latinidad. The book draws from more than 24 months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork to analyze the racialization of language as a central form of modern governance. It focuses specifically on youth socialization to US Latinidad as a contemporary site of political anxiety, “raciolinguistic” transformation, and urban inequity. Rosa’s account studies the fashioning of Latinidad in a highly segregated Chicago high school whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican. Rosa shows how anxieties surrounding language, race, and…